1 entry categorized "People: Robert from Viel"

July 07, 2014

I included this drink in The Art of the Shim: Low-Alcohol Cocktails to Keep You Level after discovering it in William "Cocktail Bill" Boothby's posthumously published 1934 book World Drinks and How to Mix Them. Unfortunately, I was not able to trace its origins back from that book. Boothby expert John C. Burton noted that many of the recipes in it appear to have been added by ghostwriters, as it is much expanded from his immediately prior book, Swallows.

I called the drink the Boulevardier 1934 to distinguish it from the earlier bourbon-based drink found in Harry McElhone's 1927 book Barflies and Cocktails.

Thanks to the research of French cocktail blogger Gaylor Olivier of The Perfect Drink, we can now retitle it the Boulevardier 1929. Based on the information he discovered in a book from that year, Cocktails de Paris by "Rip" (real name Georges Gabriel Thenon), we can assign this drink to 'Robert from Viel', a now defunct Parisian bar located at the time at number 8 Boulevard de la Madeleine. M. Robert took the grand prize with it at the barmen's championship which took place at Theatre Apollo in Paris on February 2, 1929.

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